Girl, Interrupted, Twenty-Five Years Later

Susanna Kaysen. Photo by Michael Lionstar.

When Susanna Kaysen set out to write a memoir of her time spent at the psychiatric hospital McLean, she wanted to write like “an anthropologist in the loony bin.” She had watched her husband, an anthropologist, conduct a study of Faroe Islands—“a standard anthropological thing, a study of a village, of who married and who didn’t and what were the feuds,” Kaysen told me. Her husband’s study made her realize that “McLean was sort of like a village but somewhat larger. Our ward was a tiny little village with our doctors and nurses and aides.”

Kaysen hired a lawyer and got ahold of her medical records and began writing. She pared down details about herself and her struggle with mental illness so that the resulting memoir, , reads today like a comedic travelogue of an extended stay at a young women’s ward. Lines like this one, about